A Runt’s Rant: Having Nothing to Rant About

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Back in the day, when I was in university, people used to tell me that I complained too much.

I was often told that, although it was healthy to complain every now and then, it was absolutely pointless to complain about everything. Not to mention annoying.

At that point, I couldn’t help but wonder whether if I was to complain about everything SYSTEMATICALLY (i.e. one thing at a time), people would still get frustrated.

Well, you’d be happy to know that I had found out that the above strategy worked quite well.

If you were optimistic, positive and bubbly in 80% of the time and threw in the odd rant every now and then, in the remaining 20% of the time, people would barely notice that you were complaining.

I had, however, recently noticed another thing; if you did not complain AT ALL, people AUTOMATICALLY assumed that there was something wrong with you.

The other day, in fact, I went out with a couple of friends of mine who kept asking me what was wrong with me.

Mind you, they did not do so because I was crying or because I looked horrible (not that day, anyway).

Rather, they kept on doing so because I had not complained of anything in more than two days; and that, they said, was quite worrying.

When I asked why it was worrying, I was immediately lectured on how there were two types of angry people: implosive and explosive. The latter, said Jack Nicholson in ‘Anger Management’, were the customers who shouter at the cashier day in and day out about idle things. The former, as described by the actor, are the cashiers who’d once day decide that they’d had enough of it all and so would take out a gun a shoot everyone.

As I didn’t quite know how to react to that, I smiled, rather defensively, and assured my friends that I did not have a license for a gun and was, therefore, quite incapable of such an undertaking.

Besides, I said, there were just some days on which everything seemed quite alright and you simply forgot about your troubles.

My pseudo- optimistically- sarcastic reply was met with an unnecessarily loud ‘Yeah, right!’ which came out of one of my friends; an outcry that made the barmaid turn around to give me a look so intense, it almost cracked my glasses and broke my heart (oh, the drama of it all!).

She then turned to my friends and, smiling rather slyly, snapped:

‘Hakuna matata, fellas! Leave the chap alone; he’s barely touched his pint.’

The imminent silence which followed was disrupted by the DJ playing the above song and the hearty laughs coming from each side of the table.

I then remembered that I hadn’t heard that song in ages which lead on to a ten- minute rant about how horrible music was these days.

Ah, there it was.

And, to be honest, it did feel good to have something to rant about every now and then.